The Episode That Redeemed 'Girls'

We finally got what we deserve

We started a Choose Your Own Adventure-type approach when the first few episodes of Girls' third season were, in a word, unsatisfying. Every character was unlikable. Every plotline was boring. It seemed like any challenge would expedite some kind of growth for Hannah and her friends better than the ones that actually played out on the show. At the beginning of the season, there were so many frustrating moments — Jessa's rehab escape; Hannah at David's funeral; the Marnie/Ray/Shoshanna love triangle that wasn't, etc. — that could've turned out so differently that speculating as to whether Dunham and the writers were doing right by their characters felt like a noble pursuit. We're eating crow now, because every awkward moment, painful conversation, and excruciatingly obnoxious turn for the worse came to a glorious head Sunday night, and we're finally invested again just before we say goodbye for a little while.

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The end begins with vomit, as Hannah heads out for post-work drinks and has way too many in the company of her GQ colleagues. She crashes at the lovely Joe's house and books it home the next morning in time to catch Adam before he heads to Major Barbara rehearsal in the fancy new coat the costume closet's given him to break in before previews. She's flabbergasted that Adam wasn't up all night wondering why she didn't come home, and later, when the director of Adam's play humiliates her because she crashes his rehearsal, it's clearer than crystal that there's a new woman in Adam's life, and that her name is Major Barbara, and that it's only a matter of time before this polyandrous relationship self-implodes.

Jessa is openly using again and doing so in front of a seething Shoshanna. Jasper, Jessa's raggedy partner in crime from rehab, is still hanging about, and she's presumably been axed from her job selling baby clothes because they stole cash from the store to buy drugs in the last episode. Shoshanna finds Dot, Jasper's estranged daughter, and invites her to dinner, staging an intervention/reunion over steak and effectively cutting off Jessa from one of her worst enablers. Jessa's pissed and shows it, but Shoshanna doesn't give a shit: It's time for tough love, and when Jessa sulks on the stoop of Shoshanna's building, Shosh tells it likes it is, makes Jessa admit to herself that she's a junkie, and calls it a night. She's got to study, and Jessa's got to clean herself up.

Elsewhere in Manhattan, Marnie is doing okay: You can cut the sexual tension between her and Desi with a knife as the two continue their crooning kismet at a songwriting jam session, and Desi's vein-popping intensity is so awkward it's hard to keep from openly guffawing at it. He calls her a "wordsmith," for chrissakes. She continues to try to make lemonade out of the sour lemons she's been handed, and shows up at Soo Jin's gallery only to be offered an assistant gig to the gallerina herself. Between the gallery and a step in a musical direction with Desi, Marnie's satisfying some creative urges and creating some semblance of a life that'll separate her from the "once-hot girl from high school" image once and for all.

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She also gives her apartment keys to Hannah for a night, and the gesture is one that expedites the end to Hannah and Adam as we know it. In an attempt to mix things up and get the spark back in their relationship, Hannah turns Marnie's apartment into a den of iniquity. When they first started sleeping together, the way that Adam would treat her — with role-play schemes and aggressively degrading language — seemed to turn him on, and Hannah thinks that's what could help in bringing them back to normal. She dons a blonde wig, tells Adam to meet her at a bar, and proceeds to throw a drink in his face (nice touch, as he's an alcoholic) and get him punched in the face by a random dude in the name of role-playing and (unintentional) public humiliation. She brings him back to Marnie's for champagne (again, he's an alcoholic) and strawberries and sex, and before Adam can finish she changes up the fantasy mid-thrust, telling Adam to picture the cheerleader while he's the "school weirdo." Adam freaks out — "You can't change roles in the middle of everything, it doesn't make any fuckin' narrative sense!" — and Hannah immediately gets to the point of the wrong fight. "So now that you're in a play you're the expert on what makes narrative sense? I'm a writer, too, ya know!" Adam points out that the sex they have now is different because they're in love, that she has an old idea of who he is, and that it wasn't "creepy and thought-through" like the evening Hannah planned. Something's lost in translation and has been for a long time, and before Hannah can figure it out, Adam drops the bombshell: He's moving in with Ray for the rest of the rehearsal period so that he can concentrate on the play, and Hannah's crying something about how he didn't care about the play before, and how did they get there? He says he's distracted and he needs to step away from the drama and really concentrate on the incredible opportunity Major Barbara's afforded him, and this is when Hannah really begins to lose it: "What drama? This is just me!" Adam delivers the damning parting shot with the one line that sums up the whole season for everyone: "Exactly."

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The reasons why people started watching Girls in the first place eventually came 'round again and restored our faith with snappy dialogue, ridiculous, real-world shenanigans, the relatable everyday soap operas and the devastating blows that take you by surprise when you're doing the best you can in the big city. It took a trip to the beach that went horribly awry, a merciless look at a family in crisis, a brutally honest screaming match between best friends, and the slow stare of a green-eyed monster to settle on the object of our heroine's affection for the Girls vessel to right itself and give us the kind of validation we needed. We wanted Hannah to get called out for her incapacity to consider the existence of another human being, and then we saw her hive of self-absorption collapse into itself when everyone threw their hands up and walked away. We wanted Jessa to be held accountable for her infernal consumption and sociopathic tendencies, and in the end we're left shrugging our shoulders at the girl smoking alone on a stoop because she has nothing else to do. We wanted Marnie to let go of her micromanaging ways, and yet we're left cringing at the thought of her having to swallow what's left of her pride to go play assistant for an amateur. We wanted more of Shoshanna's hummingbird-like verbal metabolism, but we also wanted her to get the hell out of New York to find some better friends. We wanted Adam to be a better boyfriend, and then he got a shitty girlfriend out of it.

We weren't happy with how the show was rolling, and of the Choose Your Own Adventure-type rewrites we fooled around with every week, some of them came true: The universe put Hannah and Jessa in their respective places, and we saw the glorious return of Elijah. In the end, this episode of Girls was very much the one we deserved, and every single one of Dunham & Co.'s choices led to moments of clarity that will only see resolution in future episodes, delivering the kind of momentum you want while keeping us hooked with the uncertainties facing these characters we now actually care about. We wanted these characters to save each other from themselves, damn it, and they're eating each other alive — and there's nothing that indicates that they won't continue to do so. That's a way to keep people watching.

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